Emily runs after Cody who’s storming off to his car. “What?! You don’t want to be friends?!”

“Not if you’re gonna act this way!” Cody turns around.

They stand in the middle of an obscure parking lot where it’s mostly empty. The clouds are heavy but it hasn’t started to rain. They can both smell the moisture seeping into the concrete. The rain, it’s coming.

“Cody-”

“I love you, Emily! I always have, and now after everything, you want to leave everything behind?!”

“This town isn’t good for me!”

“Fuck you!”

-

Chris hears the yelling and recognizes his friend’s voices. He steps out of the fair and into the parking lot to find Emily and Cody shouting at each other. Chris has never seen this. He starts to observe like he always does. He observes until Cody notices him, but he ignores his friend.

“How do you go to, ‘let’s be friends’, to ‘I don’t ever want to come back to this town’?!”

“I never said that! I just said that New York is where I belong for now! You’re being a child, Cody!”

“I’m sorry for fucking waiting for you then! Fuck!”

A fourth, unknown variable enters the image, clapping. Chris looks over and his eyes widen. Cody’s body freezes and Emily’s anger turns into confusion. She’s seen the guy somewhere before. “Bravo, a lovely display of a lover’s quarrel,” Lyle says, continuing to clap.

“You’re-”

“I’m not here for you, lover boy,” Lyle stops clapping when he stops his walk. He stands in the middle of Emily and Cody a few feet apart. He looks over to Chris, standing in front of everyone. “Chris, my boy. You’re one hard dude to find.”

“What are you doing here?” Chris asks.

“I’m only going to ask this once. Where is Sessions?”

Chris doesn’t answer. He can’t give up that girl now, not after all the work he did to set her free. Cody looks over at his friend then back to Lyle. He’s supposed to be arrested by now. His dad was supposed to take this bastard down.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Cody turns to him.

Lyle walks up to Cody and grabs his arm, pinning him down on the ground without even breaking his eye contact with Chris.

“What the fuck!” Emily yells.

“I’m not talking to you, boy,” Lyle scoffs.

“Look, I know I’m white, but that somehow feels racist,” A fifth player enters, it’s Andrew.

Lyle looks over to him and his anger only grows. “Where were you, kid? You were supposed to be at the warehouse.”

“And you’re supposed to be in handcuffs, or dead, didn’t really care which,” Andrew chuckles. “Let my friend go.”

Lyle gets up and lets Cody go, but only because he has a lesson to teach everyone here. “Where the fuck is the girl, Chris!”

“What girl?!” Emily yells.

Andrew has had enough of this. Lyle was supposed to be dealt with. It wasn’t easy becoming a snitch, only to find out things were already in motion with or without him. The only thing that happened was convincing Andrew not to go to the warehouse. He charges at Lyle. Cody realizes it too, it’s time to fight.

Lyle moves out of the way and blocks Cody’s fist with his elbow. Andrew grabs hold of Lyle and tries to throw him to the ground but Lyle using his body to hit Cody instead. He then reverses Andrew and throws him to the ground. “Two against one doesn’t really feel fair against you,” Lyle mocks them.

Cody recovers from his pain in his fist and tries to punch him again but instead gets a kick to the gut. He looks over to Emily who is backing away slowly, terrified and unable to run. Cody closes his eyes and feels a fist of brick hit his cheek.

Cody snaps.

He charges at Lyle, managing to pick him up and slammed him against the ground. He tries to pummel Lyle but every shot is blocked by his arms. Andrew watches, wheezing and using this time to recover.

Lyle knocks Cody off and kicks him in the chin. Lyle pummels Cody with a quick left jab then a strong right that knocks Cody down. Andrew goes in but his attack is blocked and countered by a kick to the ribs. It’s no use. These two boys are street fights but Lyle knows how to fight.

Andrew tries to attack one more time but he’s punched in the middle of this chest, knocking all the air out of him. Lyle knees Andrew in the face while he’s kneeling to catch his breath. This knocks Andrew out cold.

Cody gets back up and manages to hit Lyle in the jaw. It doesn’t do anything but anger Lyle even more. Cody throws a punch again but Lyle catches it and twists it behind Cody’s back. He steps on the back of Cody’s knees, making him kneel. “This is how it feels, Cody,” he says. “This is how defeat feels like.”

“F-Fuck you!”

“Y’know what’s funny?!” Lyle starts to laugh. “You were so close to saving Elizabeth. She talked about you all the time. Maybe if she went with you instead of me, she would have been alive. You failed her, just like you failed everyone here.”

Cody winces in pain but doesn’t respond. He’s facing Emily who is too mortified to even move. Chris gulps down a big ball of saliva. He can’t help, there’s nothing he can do. Andrew’s eyes open but everything is spinning and his body isn’t responding.

Lyle pulls out a silver gun out of his jeans and points it to the back of Cody’s head. “Do you want to know why she killed herself?! She saw a dude’s head completely split open at a motorcycle accident one time. I used that opportunity of death, to make her kill someone I wanted. She couldn’t bear it. Elizabeth was weak. Just like you. And now you’re going to die just like her unless Chris tells me where Sessions is!”

But Lyle doesn’t work like that. He’ll just kill all four off them once Chris tells him.

Cody continues to stare at Emily. If only he was near his car. He still has that gun he stole in the trunk, hidden away. That is the only exit point that could help him. But it’s too late, Cody closes his eyes and tries to accept his fate. He only sees Emily’s tears.

“I set her free,” Chris finally answers. “If you have to kill anyone here, kill me first.”

Lyle smirks and points the gun at Chris. Cody sees the small window and takes it. He breaks free of Lyle and pushes the gun off his hands. He leaps towards it, grabs it and points it at Lyle.

The rain begins to fall and it falls hard.

Chris has seen this before. He’s been here before and is sure of it. This isn’t just a case of Deja Vu. No, it couldn’t be, he thinks.

“What do you think you’re doing boy?” Lyle chuckles. “You think shooting me will solve any of your problems? You already failed. Destiny has brought all of us together and it doesn’t end in my death.”

“Shut the fuck up! It’s over! Leave us alone,” Cody yells. His heart is racing and his arm is starting to shake. He thinks that he doesn’t have the balls to do this, but he has too. Cody has to save his friends.

In the distance, they all start to hear police sirens turn on. Chris's mind starts to shatter. It’s happening, his dream is happening. He knows what’s going to happen now but his body can’t move, he’s too scared. Chris starts to wonder how reality works. It’s all a shame. He begs his friend for help.

But you can’t do anything, can you?

“You live in a box, unable to see what’s above you,” Lyle starts to laugh. “The world is just one cosmic journey where we all arrive at our eventual destination. Shoot me!”

“Shut up!” Cody screams, his finger slowly getting tighter on the trigger.

Emily’s heart starts to race and she doesn’t know what to do. Her body is a statue and she manages to process that she’s terrified and is having a massive panic attack. She can feel every part of her body tremble and she can’t think anymore. All she can think is about calming down. So she repeats, “Calm down,” over and over again. But like always, it never helps. The only person who can is about to kill someone.

“Cody, h-help me!” she manages to shout.

Cody's eyes break focus as he knows what those words mean and like always, he will always be there to calm her down. All she needs is a long embrace in his arms.

Lyle sees the opportunity and charges at Cody. However, Cody is too focused, he sees this and shoots.

Nothing happens.

The sirens' lights start to show.

Lyle punches Cody, causing him to drop the gun. Lyle catches it and unlocks the safety. Emily panics even more and sprints down the pavement. She falls; bangs her head on the concrete, gets up and rushes in front of Cody.

Cody snaps out of his rage and his eyes widen. Chris watches from afar. He can observe every little detail and even notices Lyle slowly squeezing the trigger. His mind breaks completely.

BANG.

A mixture of fireworks and thunder muffle the sound along with the pouring rain.

Chris drops on the floor, screams and goes silent. Cody screams along with the world with its thunder. Emily falls on the ground, trembling her hands on her chest.

Emily is on the ground shot and is bleeding out. Cody is hovering over her body not knowing what to do but then drops to his knees next to her. Lyle knows he’s out of time. The bluebirds have arrived. “Destiny isn’t finished with us just yet,” Lyle smirks and bolts out of the parking lot just before the cops surround the area.

Cody feels like the ground beneath him suddenly disappeared and he’s falling in infinite darkness that is completely blank. When he looks at Chris, Cody thinks he’s dead too. He then looks at Ems. He doesn’t know what to do.

Cody looks around and then sees everyone around him. He hears words coming from Emily and then realizes Emily was never meant for him. Cody’s darkness consumes him as he failed her just like he failed me.

But now, Emily is crying. She’s dying and so is Cody on the inside. And so Cody starts to break down.

Sara gets off the ride and searches for her missing brother. She sees the lights of the police cars in the distance. There are a bunch of officers walking around, searching for someone.

She finds her brother on the ground, unable to pick himself up. Cody is talking to a police officer. Chris is motionless on the ground. An officer is trying to stop the bleeding from Emily with the paramedics just arriving. Sara starts to walk up to the parking lot but is stopped by an officer. She can do nothing but watch.

-

Grace steps outside of the house party. She hears the police sirens all over through town. They’re chasing someone. She closes her eyes and feels every raindrop land on her skin. She feels powerful. For once she isn’t being mocked by her peers in her grade. She’s making friends, making people like her.

The coke fuels her. She is her own queen.

I don’t ever want to feel small and weak, she thinks. I can take over the school. I can be cool. I can be loved.

Grace comes back inside after one of the guys calls for her. He takes hers up to the empty room where she first took her first step in adulthood in her mind. They kiss and get together in bed. Grace wants to take an even further step.

But the guy gets nervous and leaves.

Grace goes downstairs and mocks him for it. It makes her even more liked.

Grace gets a call from Sara, telling her to come home. Grace gets another from her mother yelling at her to do the same.

-

Emily is still conscious, fighting to stay awake as hard as she can. Perhaps it’s a miracle, or maybe it’s her sheer will. However, she is sure that the bullet is in the middle of her right lung and can’t even feel her body anymore. What’s more amazing is that she can still speak and it baffles the paramedics when she shouts. “I fucking hate this town!”

-

Chris is sent to the hospital as well. It seems he has gone catatonic. Emily is prepped for surgery. Andrew and Cody are taken in for a check-up. Everyone arrives at the hospital. Emily’s father calls his ex-wife and apologizes to her and tells her she was right the whole time.

This is how the world ends. Things didn't work out as the universe blueprinted it and now Chris is at a mental hospital completely insane.

Cody once watched a documentary about near-death experiences. Many of the people who talked described as having an out of body experience and being able to see their body and things they shouldn’t be able to see because their body was unconscious. If there is a chance Emily will survive, he wonders if Ems is having this experience right now.

But nobody knows what’s going on behind those closed doors. Sara, Andrew, Jerrica, Grace, Virginia, and Ems’ father and now Cody wishes for the best. And they all want; they don’t need Emily to survive.

And this is humanity. Chris had realized this a long time ago. We don’t need anything. We are alone and lost. We search for Gods because we are nothing more but weak. We hold onto our beliefs and morals thinking they will make us good people. But at the end of the day, we are still alone.

Cody also realizes this. We all do. It is part of the human experience. We will all love, and lose that love. We will fall into the burning darkness and those who are strong enough will be able to climb out of it no matter how much they fall. People are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed only to be rebuilt again. Unlike Chris, he knows people are strong. They have strong wills. People do not die easily.

And all of this is how humanity stays alive. We may be greedy. We can destroy life, we can destroy each other and we can destroy the world, but no matter what, we will always love each other.

The dollar bills, the land, the status, the power, the fame, the legacy.

These brutes that lead us don’t realize that it all goes away given time. Greed dies with the person but greed is the only thing that keeps us alive. Because really, what else is there to do but to be selfish enough to want that for others?

It’s funny that I wasn’t strong enough to see all this.

It all started with whatever a person believes. It started with God and nothing, or it just started from nothing. This is what drove Chris insane. How the fuck is consciousness possible? What exactly is the nothing in-between the nucleus and the electrons? Is this nothingness used to give space to the universe that holds lives? These impossible questions destroyed a human life. The infinite figure eights. The fine and only grand consciousness; trapped in an eternal self hell.

A universe is just a projection to keep itself from going insane.

And so everyone worries.

Policemen find Chris’s parents. They inform them what’s going on. To them, Chris always seemed fine. It’s only then that they realized they had no idea what was going on in his life.

Stories are bound to have plot twists. They may be small or cliché but they always happen.

Grace takes out her journal and finally starts her summer homework. She stops and thinks about what she wants to write about. She thinks about Sara and thinks about Emily and she thinks about the girl named Grace. She is the center of the universe after all.

Grace starts to cry and she knows why.

-Grace: July 4th, 2013

I don’t know what to write.

I guess…I think I made a big mistake today. I tried coke for the first time. I was out enjoying myself while the whole world was falling apart. How selfish can I be?

Fuck

I just don’t know. Sara tells me all these things about sadness and tragedy. She tells me how we only have each other to rely on when we can’t stand. But how can we when Emily was shot? Emily was shot and I don’t know if she’s gonna make it. She’s in critical condition. I hope she makes it.

But I saw how badly Cody was terrified. It pained me to see him like that. I’ve never seen a guy cry so much. Hell, he fought security to try to get in the surgery room after he was released from wherever the cops had him. Watching all that. He doesn’t really care about me, does he? We won’t work out.

It was a thousand times more depressing than when Sara sat us all down. Nobody seems to know where Chris went except for Cody but he could barely speak. All he said was that Chris went catatonic whatever that means.

I…I don’t know what I’m writing down anymore. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I don’t know my own feelings. I feel like I have no emotion at all. I don’t even care anymore. The word for this is Apathy.

But I’m crying.

And I’m gone.

Long Gone